How Much Bandwidth Do You Consume Per Month? - And are you willing to be billed by the byte?
With the media's recent rediscovery of Comcast's half-decade old practice of booting high-consumption users, our Comcast forum regulars are running a poll asking just how much bandwidth you consume per month …
Context & Ripple Effects
The story sits at the seam of two Comcast storylines running through 2007: the carrier spent the spring selling speed — CEO Brian Roberts publicly demonstrated a channel-bonding modem hitting 150 Mbps at CableLABs-adjacent events in May, roughly 25x a standard cable modem — while, per the confirmed reporting here, it has for years been quietly terminating its heaviest-consuming subscribers without a published threshold.
What changed on September 11 is attention: mainstream media rediscovered the booting practice, trade press picked it up (RCR Wireless ran 'Paying for the bandwidth we consume' the same day), and DSLReports' Comcast forum regulars responded with a reader poll asking how much bandwidth people actually use — an attempt to size the affected population precisely because neither Comcast nor its rivals disclose usage numbers or cutoff points.
First-order effects
- Heavy Comcast subscribers learn their decade-old flat-rate assumption carries a real risk of account termination, with the company's thresholds undisclosed even as the practice gets named publicly.
- DSLReports' poll gives the broadband community its first crowd-sourced baseline of monthly consumption, turning an anecdote about booted users into measurable demand for disclosure.
Second-order effects
- Rival cable and DSL providers watch whether Comcast absorbs the reputational cost alone or normalizes enforcement, since any one carrier capping heavy users relieves peer network costs and pressures others to match.
- The contradiction with Comcast's own 150 Mbps speed push sharpens: faster pipes accelerate the very consumption that triggers booting, forcing the company to reconcile capacity marketing with usage policing.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement spreads without published limits, the industry drifts from unlimited flat-rate pricing toward measured or tiered billing — making 'how many bytes did you use?' a standard consumer question and usage transparency a regulatory pressure point.
- Carriers that own the measurement layer would gain pricing power over content providers whose services drive consumption, prefiguring the pipe-versus-content economics fight over who pays for bandwidth growth.
The trend: US broadband is moving from flat-rate unlimited access toward usage-measured pricing, with undisclosed enforcement practices like Comcast's user terminations marking the transition's least transparent phase.